Hue lights turning on and off in a parallel

Hi all,
Having another attempt with SmartThings after giving up a bit too easily a couple of years back. I have a lot of hue colour changing spotlights in one room (19 in total) and want to set up my SmartThings system to control these.

The issue I have is that when I turn the “room” group on and off they react one by one which is fine in room where I have 2 bulbs but not very elegant where my spots are. Also the ST hub never seems to turn them all off and on; there is always one or two left on which is random and annoying.

To get round this for now I have created a number of virtual dimmers and am using these with IFTTT via the SmartThings - hue applet which works through the hue hub and does what I want. It does however come with its own side effect of a 3-4 second delay which also isn’t ideal.

My question is are these my only 2 options? If so IFTTT is preferable as is more stable, and looks better but it seems a long winded solution.

Thanks in advance!

You can also try community created versions of the Hue integration that adds support for direct control of Hue Groups (and Scenes). Then you can create the Group in the Hue app and control it directly.

This is the most up to date I could find…

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you can also try trend setter to group your hue lights…

Brilliant thank you both! Will try it tonight.

This is called a “popcorn effect” and is a known issue with SmartThings right now. Unfortunately I don’t think Trendsetter will work because of the way the SmartThings/Hue integration works. (It would work for most other kinds of lights, but not all. )

The smartapps that have support for Hue scenes created in the Hue app itself should work much better, so look for that distinction as you review the choices.

You can see discussion of this issue, which unfortunately has been going on for about a year, in the following thread (this is a clickable link)

There is a new official device type handler which was released a couple of weeks ago and is supposed to help with this problem, so you might want to switch to the new device type handler if your devices are not using it.

Otherwise, the only really solid way to fix this is to create a Hue scene in the hue app (not the SmartThings app). And then activate the scenes through the free IFTTT service or through one of the smartapps that can trigger those scenes such as the one @Sticks18 mentioned . That way the group command will get sent by the hue bridge as part of the scene and you should have much less of a popcorn effect as well as eliminating the problem of some bulbs never getting the message.

Using IFTTT is a little easier than using the smartapps because you don’t have to re-add the hue bridge to your SmartThings account, so you might test with that method first to see if it does make a difference.

That might add a little lag upfront because of IFTTT, but once the message gets to the hue bridge operation should be much smoother.

Thank you. Sounds like some trial and error is needed to find what works best for me. I have the ifttt option as you suggested running already so will compare to the others. Either way ifttt will be my backup as it really ruins the effect for me having to watch them turn on/ off one by one with the whole process lasting 30 seconds or so.

Must say they I am glad I am persevering as SmartThings will undoubtedly finally give me a way of incorporating my devices the way I want them, and the forum support so far is a massive benefit!

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I’m having this issue with Scenes, not even involving Hue.

Probably a Scenes bug and off Topic…